


Conducting How the Red Sea should Pour

by qeacock



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Blood and Violence, Gen, Heavy Angst, High Chaos (Dishonored), High Chaos Corvo Attano, Hurt No Comfort, Low Chaos Emily Kaldwin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-17
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2020-10-20 18:49:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20680205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qeacock/pseuds/qeacock
Summary: The rain sounds like boulders coming down. People are still charging towards him- they are ingurgitated by the rats, completely and wholly consumed (they eat to the marrow, leaving nothing behind, feasting, devouring, ripping and tearing).





	Conducting How the Red Sea should Pour

The storm in him spins. It rages, a howling tempest, and becomes whipping, cutting wind, razing everything down. An infernal darkness collapses inside his chest and explodes into the hard tattoo lines of his Mark, like a sea crashing against rocks. 

No one and nothing can stop him. The walls are all crashing down. The Void in him fizzes, splitting every diamond-hard resolve into fissures. 

It rains like hitting blows, hail beating down fists. It smacks across his shoulders, making the steps drain every effort out of his body - every beat of his heart clutching each single muscle in his chest, every spasming, gasping movement burning all of his bones to cinders and fatigue. 

There is no style left. He cannot fashion his blade into anything but brute strength, blunt force. He moves with zero energy and carries into each momentum the weight of a thousand suns, eviscerating every guard that follows him, cleaving each head in halves, hacking each rib open, displaying the viscera in sheaves of red dripping glory, shambling forward under night black splendour.

Every bash of his elbows (back and forth, back and forth, conducting how the Red Sea should pour) winds him, hot ragged breaths forced out of his bleeding throat - he coughs the breaths out, dripping in flesh, stripping his throat clean. 

He stumbles and trips over the corpses. He howls in fire enragement. He barks like a wild animal, choking on the blood pouring down his face, washed from his eyes by the hammer rain. 

He chases the own fleeting invincibility of his Mark until he collapses over his own coats, blinded by carmine.

Emily is clutching his finger, blushed pink, swaddled-

Jessamine's raven hair catches the candlelight, coloured like sheening whale-oil-

Blood, soaking deep under his fingernails, yellow shock-

Emily pulls back from him, sticky from the blood on his coat (her white blouse is blotched black, his knife is seeping into his holster side, dripping of copper)

His lungs are locked shut. All of his body is straining forward. He cannot tell if he is crawling or walking. Shoulders burning, sweat glides down his back. His coat shoves him down- someone- someone laughs- he grits his teeth. His mouth throbs closed, lips dragging over the floor. His heartbeat is vibrating in the roof of his mouth.

Something sloughs off the end of his blade. 

He opens his eyes. More blood pulses out, thick as pulp. He drags the backs of his hands over his lashes. He swoons. Rain overwhelms him. Pathmaker clatters down the gap in the railing.

The only time the blade has been clean, it's dimpled by the rain, torn away into the howling dark below. The blood is so caked on it the dry looks like rust, red to the root.

He watches it turn in the air. Glad.

"Corvo! Corvo, help me!"

The rain sounds like boulders coming down. People are still charging towards him- they are ingurgitated by the rats, completely and wholly consumed (they eat to the marrow, leaving nothing behind, feasting, devouring, ripping and tearing).

Their grit feet scratch the leather of his boots. The ground he moves across is writhing like liquid. He marches forward, dead and alive, moving and static, driven only by borrowed Void energy. 

He cannot run. Every organ in him shudders inward. He stumbles over his own rats, coughing so hard he can no longer take air into his lungs. Every fibre in his body is concentrated into his step, inspired by mind alone, breathing by unshakeable force of will. His every neuron hyper-exerted and trembling with strain.

He Blinks and Blinks and Blinks. His stomach floats in weightlessness.

"_CORVO!_"

Emily screams. It sounds like poison. White flashes behind his eyes. He is so weak he shakes like an avalanche coming down, cringing away- but the pain is inside. He cannot run. 

So tired he cannot keep his eyes open and in the same moment urgency making his breath come faster, harder. Wind blasts the door open. The back of his left hand burns all the way up the bone.

He shouts. He shouts like a strangled man. There is nothing human left in him to scream for her. 

Her black eyes look obsidian, wet in the rain. Dead, oil-slick eyes. Eyes black on black. She struggles and yowls. She hisses, "Corvo," like the sound is stuck in her throat. 

She hesitates on his name. He staggers before her, weeping, his body running on scraps. Dying people do not hesitate.  
He falls so hard down to his knees it startles the breath from him.

Emily makes a sound like his name, but not- she spits it from her teeth, mouth full of blood, this garbled sound ripping itself out.

On his hands and knees he crawls, hair dripping down his nose. He Blinks forward. Havelock's gun goes off, muffled in the wet dark- he misses. It shutters like a bolt of lightning. He is blinded by panic.

Emily struggles and yelps. Her black mary janes strike him across the face- she's falling- she's falling- she's falling-

He reaches out blindly, grabbing the sole- ankle- shin. His muscles are screaming at him to let go. 

He has carried men three times his size across his back, barely sweating for the effort. Scaled mountainous buildings by strength alone, paying no attention besides the next foothold, stretching his muscles easily- nothing is harder than forcing his hold onto Emily. 

It is like reaching into the sea.

He grabs ash-knuckled at her, fingers too weak to press, two Hearts wailing, dead and beating deep inside his coat pocket.

Deep pangs of- something- burst inside him. He doesn't recognise what it is anymore, but it makes his fingers jitter. 

"Let me go!" She kicks him in the face, again. He barely has a hold on her waist (her blouse is slipping from his fingers, soaked in blood and rainwater). "Let me GO!" His jaw tightens, he growls. Why can't she understand? She'll fall if he lets go. He's saving her.  
"You-" she whispers, then screams,"_fucking-_" 

He shouts, almost dropping her. He pulls her up and smacks her face-down into the ground, snarling. 

She twists her shoulder to look at him. Emily's cry pierces straight through him. Stabbed in the stomach, puncture, clean exit wound - she looks like a beast. She looks like him. 

He recoils from her gaze, astonished. His armour is torn away. He is nothing.  
She picks herself up. She stands with a gaze so fiery in passion and bruising in the morose that he bows from the waist, accidentally swallowing the water that comes down, wiping the blood from his eyes.

"No!" Her throat is shredded raw from shouting. 

All of her ligaments are drawn tight. "You said you only hurt bad people! You said…" 

She bursts into tears. 

He works his heart into a pace pressing his lips into the words. He chokes on his own dizzying array of flashing pulses, barely whispering, "They deserved. It."

"I don't care!" She stomps twice as hard as her voice. "I don't _care_! You're just as rotten as them, _Corvo!_"

_You deserve it, too.  
Her eyes are black as the Outsider. The Void smashes against the cold dead organ in his chest._

The Heart sogs as wet flesh in his side, jumping erratically, moaning,

_"Misery. Everywhere. No! Shield me from the blood you've spilled!"_

**Author's Note:**

> Dunwall Tower is not so tall that it can rise above the stench of death.


End file.
